HISD board will reconsider Dodson closure

By Ericka Mellon |
April 4, 2014
| Updated: April 5, 2014 12:11am

Facing continued protests from parents and activists over the looming closure of Dodson Elementary, Houston school trustees plan to reconsider its fate.

Board president Juliet Stipeche (shown above in a 2011 file photo), with support from two trustees, exercised a rarely used policy to bring the item back to the board for consideration Thursday - four weeks after the board voted 5-4, to close Dodson. Stipeche, whose district includes Dodson, voted with the majority in March to close the school.

Facing continued protests from parents and activists over the looming closure of Dodson Elementary, Houston school trustees plan to reconsider its fate.

Board president Juliet Stipeche, with support from two trustees, exercised a rarely used policy to bring the item back to the board for consideration Thursday - four weeks after the board voted 5-4, during a tense meeting, to close Dodson. It's unclear whether there are enough votes to save the school.

"We're expecting the community to keep up the pressure," said Loretta Brock, a community activist who organized a student boycott over the closure. "We are turning up the heat."

Stipeche, whose district includes Dodson, voted with the majority in March to close the school. After mounting criticism, she received support from trustees Wanda Adams and Rhonda Skillern-Jones to add an item to the board agenda next week, over objections from Superintendent Terry Grier's administration.

Grier had proposed closing five small schools, but Stipeche used her power as board president to remove three of them from the list in early March. The board later voted to close Dodson and to turn Jones High into a specialty career-focused school without athletics.

Grier's staff released a statement Friday saying the administration stands by its recommendation to close Dodson, a few miles south of downtown, and to rezone the students to Blackshear, Lantrip and Rusk next school year.

"Regardless of the outcome, we will continue to work with the entire Dodson community - teachers, students, parents, community members - to ensure that we create a school environment where students can focus on learning," the statement said.

HISD's initial closure proposal said Dodson landed on the list because of "changes in housing development patterns." Grier also acknowledged that district officials wanted to use the building to house students from other schools being rebuilt - a justification that frustrated Dodson supporters.

Officials are considering temporarily housing students from the Energy Institute High School and the High School for Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, Stipeche's alma mater, at the Dodson campus during rebuilding.

"After careful consideration of additional information and community input, I felt the need for this to be reconsidered," Stipeche said, adding that Dodson's Montessori program was popular enough to draw more than 200 applications, and parents were concerned about security around Blackshear Elementary. "I know that it's difficult."

Dodson enrolls about 445 students. Blackshear, a couple miles away, has about 340.

Trustee Paula Harris, who voted in the minority to keep open Dodson, said she expects to be absent from the board meeting Thursday. If Stipeche is the only trustee who changes her vote, the motion to keep Dodson open will fail on a tie.

Trustee Anna Eastman, who also voted against closure, said she is unsure how she'll vote. She said she opposed the Dodson closure last month because it wasn't part of a broader facilities plan.

"I just have a real problem with putting something up for vote one month and then bringing it back the next month," Eastman said.